. You are not awake till you strike it.

Up and dressed, careless of breakfast, he hears the postman's knock.

There is Something for the boy, which at a glance instantly dispels the
clouds of his drowsiness and makes his heart jump: an envelope not
bulky, an envelope whose contents tremble in his hand and grow dim in
his eyes, and have to be read and read again before they can be
believed. One of his stories has at last found a place and will be
printed next month! Life may bestow on us its highest honours, and
wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, the guerdon of a glorious lot, but
it can never transcend or repeat the thrill and ecstasy of the
triumphant apotheosis of such a moment as that.

It was a fairy story, and though nobody could have suspected it, the
fairy queen was Miss Goodall, much diminished in stature, of course,
with all her indubitable excellencies, her nobility of character, and
her beauty of person sublimated to an essence that only a Lilliputian
vessel could hold. Her instincts were domestic, and her domain was the
hearthstone, and there she and her attendants, miniatures of the
charming damsels in Miss McGinty's peachy and strawberry-legged _corps
de ballet_, rewarded virtue and trampled meanness under their dainty,
twinkling feet. Moreover, the story was to be paid for, a condition of
the greater glory, an irrefragable proof of merit. Only as evidence of
worth was money thought of, and though much needed, it alone was
lightly regarded. The amount turned out to be very small. The editor
handed it out of his trousers pocket--not the golden guinea looked for,
but a few shillings. He must have detected a little disappointment in
the drooping corners of the boy's mouth, for without any remark from
him he said--he was a dingy and inscrutable person--"That is all we
ever pay--four shillings per _colyume_," pronouncing the second
syllable of that word like the second syllable of "volume."

What did the amount matter to the boy? A paper moist and warm from the
press was in his hands, and as he walked home through sleet and snow
and wind--the weather of the old sea-port was in one of its
tantrums--he stopped time and again to look at his name, his very own
name, shining there in letters as lustrous as the stars of heaven.

When that little story of mine appeared in all the glory of print, Fame
stood at my door, a daughter of the stars in such array that it blinded
one to look at her. She has n